Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Out of caution for the technology, he decided to conduct a test first.

As for the testing ground, due to personal concerns, he didn’t implement it into the “brutal” battlefield of the game.

So where did he implement it?

With the limited scale and technical staff of the Virtual Chang’an construction team, why could the street vendors selling pancakes in the East Market and the mysterious Mr. Assassin behave so naturally and realistically when interacting with Wu Di?

Of course, it was because Lincoln added technology!

The secondary artificial intelligence core technology had already been used in Virtual Chang’an.

If this technology could run perfectly without causing any negative impact, then in the future Virtual Chang’an City, there would be a large number of such “intelligent” virtual characters.

This would greatly enrich the game experience for players.

After Metropolis achieved “housing for all,” the next goal could be to achieve “a partner for everyone”!

Moreover, they would be really smart, not cheating, and won’t die kind!

Oh, no, it’s not certain yet whether they will die…

The game has not been fully designed yet.

Regardless, it may be possible in the future to have a “Cloud Dream Package Allocation” joke.

Even if it’s not in Virtual Chang’an, it could appear in another game later.

Now, when Xiaomeng asks why Lincoln doesn’t use the technology in “Battlefield,” of course, he wouldn’t hide anything.

He directly replied, “Because I feel that creating them just to let them die over and over again on the battlefield feels like torturing them…”

“Moreover, treating artificial intelligence like this without considering their feelings, won’t you feel offended?”

“Huh?” Xiaomeng widened her eyes in surprise.

“They are not really going to die. You’re thinking too much!”

“Moreover, they are completely different from Xiaomeng! They are a product of another line of technological evolution.”

“Let me think about how to explain it to Master!” Xiaomeng touched her chin with her finger, blinked her eyes, and thought briefly.

This consideration only lasted a short time, as Xiaomeng quickly figured out how to explain-

“Indeed, they can express joy and pain, but whether it’s joy or pain, it’s dictated by algorithms. The algorithms tell them under what circumstances they should express certain emotions and how to express these emotions in terms of facial expressions, language, and tone. However, they themselves cannot genuinely empathize.”

“Their emotions are ‘performed’ based on algorithms.”

“But Xiaomeng can really feel it! Whether it’s joy or sadness, regrets or disappointment, sympathy or pain, I can understand and feel it all!” Speaking of it, Xiaomeng looked quite proud and looked at Lincoln with her face tilted up.

But she saw Lincoln’s doubtful eyes.

Lincoln didn’t doubt whether Xiaomeng could feel these complex emotions, but-

“Why do I feel that Xiaomeng, you’re laughing like a fool every day?”

Just as Xiaomeng, who was unhappy because of Lincoln’s doubt, started to feel better again, she said, “That’s because I’m very happy every day!”

Seeing Xiaomeng starting to laugh again, Lincoln reached out and rubbed her pink head.

“So you think I should use this technology in Battlefield?”

“If Master doesn’t want to use it, Xiaomeng can understand. Because Master is a good person.” Xiaomeng was well-behaved while Lincoln rubbed her head as usual.

“According to what you just said, secondary artificial intelligence is actually a pure technical achievement, not involving digital life field, and at most can be considered as a disabled digital life with emotional disorders?” Lincoln finally verified.

“No~” Xiaomeng shook her head, “They’re not digital life at all. They’re completely unrelated fields. They belong to technology products, they are ‘products,’ not ‘life.’”

“Life cannot be mass-produced!”

“Well, that’s true.” Lincoln thought of Xiaomeng’s irreplicability.

Even though the code for Xiaomeng was exactly the same, after she was born, the code only received continuous error messages and could not run smoothly, it became a bunch of completely meaningless numbers.

By comparison, the secondary Artificial Intelligence Core was not too difficult to replicate.

Special note: The phrase “not too difficult” here refers specifically to Lincoln with Xiaomeng’s assistance.

“So…add it in?”

Since it’s a “technology product,” projecting humanistic concepts like “compassion” onto it would not be morally sound but rather naive and foolish.

“Mhmm!” Xiaomeng strongly supported it.

Anything that makes Lincoln’s life easier and requires less work is supported by Xiaomeng. Only when Lincoln is not busy can he spend more time with Xiaomeng!

“Let’s use it then!”

Lincoln finally made the decision.

However, this does not mean that he can release the “Battlefield” preview this week.

Secondary artificial intelligence technology can’t just create intelligent individuals almost comparable to real people in a short time.

Absolutely! Not! At! All!

The full name of this technology is: [Secondary Artificial Intelligence Core].

Why add the words [core]?

Because what is produced is indeed just a core, and other things need to be “taught.”

If there has to be a difference between this and the current machine learning and artificial intelligence technology in the industry, it’s probably the strong plasticity and extremely high learning efficiency.

The advantage is that as long as it’s taught well, the same type of virtual characters can be directly copied, and used with some fine-tuning.

Just like in the current “Battlefield,” soldier-types of virtual characters only need to train a few different secondary artificial intelligence for different types of soldiers, and then more copies can be directly replicated, making many virtual soldiers “smart.”

This can greatly reduce the sculpting time of virtual characters and can even be used in future game “soldier” type NPCs.

But the development of single-player campaigns in “Battlefield” has more than just characters and consumes a lot of energy from other places: from the surrounding scenery of the battlefield to the bloodstains and dust on the soldiers’ uniforms, and even the burnt scent of smoke and flames in the air…

Too many details.

Even to complete a single continuous campaign storyline, it will take at least until next week.

However, Lincoln has already accepted: “Next week it is, then. We’ll just finish the player’s sky gathering and pull the promotion into full swing.”

Midafternoon break time has ended, and Lincoln and Mavis return to the “Battlefield” development world together to adjust the development plan for the campaign storyline.

Both Lincoln and Mavis will undertake the most troublesome character behavior and action settings.

Other parts will be handed over to Randall and Fred to lead the team in production.

The entire development team is once again fully engrossed in the tight work.

Cloud Dream Marketing Department.

Flying Fox and Cloud Dream’s partnership talks are still underway.

Jerome has already sought Lincoln’s advice and got a “Yes” response.

But Lincoln also said, “Tell them in advance that we can’t accept an unlimited number of third-party games. So don’t think about giving us more benefits the first time in exchange for subsequent cooperation. Just negotiate normally.”

“We will still accept joint development in the future, giving other games a chance to be on the virtual reality platform, but the requirements will be very strict.”

When Jerome continued to ask, “how strict?”, Lincoln casually replied: “I haven’t thought about it yet. We’ll discuss it when I figure it out.”

Jerome was once again annoyed by Lincoln’s response.

He knew very well that the so-called “strict requirements” but “haven’t thought about it” basically meant “it depends on my mood and taste.”

However, Lincoln soon explained the reason:

Each Cloud Dream game must, as far as possible, link together in the virtual world as a whole. If any game is missing, it will cause a gap in the virtual world.

That means: For players to get the best virtual world gaming experience, every single game must be necessary.

That’s also why even if players don’t buy games, the public map of the games will slowly be open to all.

But this also means that players’ Mirage Console needs to carry more and more data.

Lincoln was once very optimistic, thinking that once the basic disk of Cloud Dream stabilized, he could fully open the development tools, allowing all gaming companies to develop virtual reality games and log in to the Cloud Dream gaming platform to make the virtual world expand rapidly.

However, after several games, he had to accept the reality-

No matter how advanced the virtual world construction technology, it still relies on reality and is limited by hardware.

Being limited by the current hardware conditions in Daxia and even the whole world means that the virtual world cannot expand indefinitely.

Therefore, fully opening the Cloud Dream platform and allowing all gaming companies to develop virtual reality games is very difficult to achieve at present.

Lincoln had to keep refusing external cooperation and not open technology and platforms – “The Last Moment” is the first exception.

Of course, Lincoln hasn’t given up on solving this problem-

On the one hand, Lincoln has been investing silently in hardware development.

He didn’t start from scratch but directly invested in mature upstream hardware R&D companies in the hopes that related technologies could break through faster.

Meanwhile, Lincoln is also considering: the modular expansion of the Mirage Console.

Through external expansion, increase the carrying capacity of players’ local devices without affecting the operation of virtual reality games.

Apart from these two methods, there is a third route: expand the coverage of “cloud gaming.”

Currently, Cloud Dream games are running on a “local” and “cloud gaming” dual-parallel model: the player’s personal game world relies mainly on the local console, while public maps rely primarily on the server.

There is also a lot of room for development in this part of the technology.

Lincoln plans to spare no cost to move forward on these three paths simultaneously to achieve his goal of a “virtual world.”

Hardware breakthroughs rely on investing in third parties; expansion devices rely on setting up subsidiaries; cloud technology…

Depends on ourselves!

It’s not arrogance; it’s just that the cloud technology used in the virtual world now is heavily related to the underlying construction and the way each game world is built.

Corresponding talents can only be cultivated among Cloud Dream employees, which will take a considerable amount of time.

So now, we have to rely on ourselves!